Celebrity Quotes

I was doing the workout before I started the business, and it gave me back a sense of control over my body,” she told PEOPLE’s editor-in-chief Jess Cagle, in the most recent episode of the Jess Cagle Interview.

“The longer space you put between yourself and the addiction, the easier it gets,” she says of recovering from both bulimia and anorexia. “I started the workout, and that kind of cemented my ability to eat normal, which I can do now. Some people say you can never get over it, but you can.”

As for how she finally stopped the cycle of bingeing and purging—or simply avoiding food altogether—she says the reality was, she was getting too old to handle it.

As for how she finally stopped the cycle of bingeing and purging—or simply avoiding food altogether—she says the reality was, she was getting too old to handle it.

“As you get older, with each binge, the fatigue and the hostility and self-loathing lasts longer,” she says. “I had a husband and children and a career, and I was politically active. I couldn’t keep doing it all and allow this addiction to ruin my life. So I stopped cold turkey.”

She adds that it wasn’t easy: “Oh it was so hard,” she admits.

Fonda says she’d like others to understand that eating disorders are never actually about food. “It has to do with filling a hole,” she says. “We’re vessels that need to be full in spirits…but there are other ways to fill it.”

“I was just leaving the gym and a man I did not know approached me and asked me what I’d just been doing…. I told him I had been cycling because I have anxiety and that’s why I come to the gym. And he decided to tell me, without prompt, that he sees me around and thinks ‘oh what a shame, she could look so amazing,’ and there’s so many different things I could do to improve my body… So he essentially walked up to me and body-shamed me in the middle of the gym. Don’t do that. Don’t walk up to someone and impose your belief of what you think they should look like onto them. Don’t do that to women, don’t do that to men, don’t do that to anyone ever.”

Jamil also speculated that behavior like this prevents people from going to the gym “because they’re afraid of being judged… I don’t like walking around thinking that people are looking at me and analyzing what I should or shouldn’t look like. I’m comfortable, I enjoy my body. I enjoy my curves. I’m also, by the way, a U.S. size 6 to 8, so if that’s how I’m being spoken to at the gym, you can imagine what people say to people who are larger than that.”

“To that man… don’t walk up to a woman ever again and say anything like that. I don’t need your advice. I don’t want your advice. I didn’t ask you for your advice as to whether or not you think i’m good looking enough. Just f—k off.”

… says 32 year-old Jameela.

When I told him I was happy with my body, he looked both surprised and slightly sorry for me. Never walk up to someone and tell them how much better they could look. You’re not being nice, you’re shaming them for the way they currently look. You’re also being extremely weird. pic.twitter.com/FeYBluU0vw

I don’t know if men wake up, look in the mirror and hate themselves. Most women do. So I have a big secret: I don’t look in the mirror. I’m a 60-year-old woman. I am not going to look the same as I used to, and I don’t want to be confronted by that every day! When I get out of the shower, I have a choice: I can dry myself off looking in the mirror, or I can dry myself off with my back to it. I turn my back to the mirror, and I feel great! I don’t want women to hate themselves, because I think women are extraordinary.

Do I think I really know what works? Yeah. It’s no accident that everyone says to me all the time that I still look like I did in Clueless. I see the difference if I eat a certain way for a day, so I choose to make more than one meal be that great meal. After only two weeks of being vegan, people were beginning to ask, “What is going on with you? You look amazing! I was still eating lots of white pasta, french fries, and all sorts of sludgy things (in fact, I still do sometimes). All I’d given up was meat and dairy, and yet I began to look better in just two weeks!